Facebook and Instagram suffered widespread outage due to DDoS attack

Facebook was down for nearly an hour globally early Tuesday morning. While Facebook went down, other Facebook-owned platforms also saw a temporary failure. Instagram, AIM, and Tinder were all impacted by the breach or failure, in addition to Facebook. While the outage lasted just an hour, the hacker group called Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for the hack. It was widely reported that the outage was related to a distributed denial-of-service attack, also known as a DDoS attack, which became mainstream knowledge during the Christmas Day outage that left both gaming networks run by Sony and Microsoft paralyzed.

All of that being said, and even with Lizard Squad claiming responsibility in a tweet issued early in the morning Tuesday – Facebook remained stern on their position. “Earlier today many people had trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram. This was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems,” the company said in a statement on the issue.

Facebook was quick to downplay the security threat, finishing their statement by saying “We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100 percent for everyone.” This shows just how powerful these hacker groups really have become. While there won’t be a lot of evidence to actually prove whether Lizard Squad was behind the attack or not – it remains a hot-button issue for many, simply due to the sheer volume of attacks that seem to be happening, and coming to fruition. That combined with the fact that all it takes is a tweet or statement claiming responsibility – and most people assume it must have happened.

Even security and social media experts have weighed in on the issue and said if nothing else, it’s far too early to begin predicting what caused the outage. Matt Navarra, the Social Media Director of the tech website thenextweb.com said “While it’s inconvenient for users and frustrating for Facebook and other services that went down, it’s fairly unlike that user data has been exposed.”

Ultimately, that is the biggest concern most users have with any service that becomes compromised for any reason. Whether it’s a malicious attack or simply a failure on the part of the company at hand, data-loss is by far the biggest concern individuals have in 2015.